COP26 has been billed as the last chance to make the decisions that will be necessary to prevent catastrophic climate change. From around the world twenty-five thousand world leaders and delegates have gathered for two weeks of hard bargaining. Eyebrows have been raised at the environmental impact of the conference itself, not least because of VIPs flying in on hundreds of private jets.
Challenged on this the British Foreign Secretary replied, ‘When you really get into crunch negotiations, when you want to look somebody in the eye and talk to them face to face, you do need to meet in person’.
A truer word was never spoken, and it explains why God chose to live on earth in the person of Jesus Christ. The Bible declares that Jesus was the ‘image of the invisible God’, and ‘the exact representation of His being’, ‘[God made] flesh and dwelling among us’. What then was the message that was so important that God needed to speak with us face to face? Simply this: he wanted us to know that he loved us so much that he was prepared to sacrifice himself in order to save us from our sins.
The message for those meeting at COP26 is clear: do something now before it is too late. The message of Jesus was and is the same.